The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  He lit a candle stub by his cot side and lay down. He picked up a dog-eared book—a precious commodity in the camp—a romance which he was reading before sleep to take his mind elsewhere and had nearly finished. But now drunk, exhausted, sick, Dorrigo Evans had neither the energy to read nor the desire to move, and he could feel sleep already claiming him. He put the book back down and snuffed the candle out.

  5

  THE OLD MAN was dreaming he was a young man sleeping in a prisoner-of-war camp. Dreaming was the most real thing Dorrigo Evans now knew. He had followed knowledge, like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

  He sat up.

  What’s the time?

  Nearly three.

  I have to go.

  He didn’t dare say Ella’s name. Nor the word wife, nor the word home.

  Where’s that kilt?

  You were thinking of her again, weren’t you?

  My kilt?

  It hurts me, you know.

  Bloody damn kilt.

  He had arrived in a kilt, following the annual dinner of the Parramatta Burns Society, to which he had belonged since his work had brought him to Sydney in 1974, and of which he was patron for no reason that he could fathom other than, perhaps, his public vice of whisky and his secret vice of women. And now the kilt was lost.

  Not Ella, she said. Because that’s not love.

  He thought of his wife. He found his marriage a profound solitude. He did not understand why he was married, why sleeping with several different women was seen to be wrong, why all of it meant less and less. Nor could he say what was the strange ache at the base of his stomach that grew and grew, why he so desperately needed to smell Lynette Maison’s back, or why the only real thing in his life were his dreams.

  He opened the bar fridge, took out the last Glenfiddich miniature, and noticed with a shake of his head the new touchpad technology that meant once he had taken the bottle out it was immediately recorded electronically. He sensed the coming of a new neater world, a tamer world, a world of boundaries and surveillance, where everything was known and nothing needed to be experienced. He understood his public self—the side they put on coins and stamps—would meld well with the coming age, and that the other side, his private self, would become increasingly incomprehensible and distasteful; this side others would conspire to hide.

  It did not fit with the new age of conformity that was coming in all things, even emotions, and it baffled him how people now touched each other excessively and talked about their problems as though naming life in some way described its mystery or denied its chaos. He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly evaluated and, as much as possible, eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more moving than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food. The Australia that took refuge in his head was mapped with the stories of the dead; the Australia of the living he found an ever stranger country.

  Dorrigo Evans had grown up in an age when a life could be conceived and lived in the image of poetry, or, as it was increasingly with him, the shadow of a single poem. If the coming of television and with it the attendant idea of celebrity—who were otherwise people, Dorrigo felt, you would not wish to know—ended that age, it also occasionally fed on it, finding in the clarity of those who ordered their lives in accordance with the elegant mystery of poetry a suitable subject for imagery largely devoid of thought.

  A documentary about Dorrigo going back to the Line on Anzac Day in 1972 first established him in the national consciousness, and his position was enhanced by further appearances on talk shows on which he affected the stance of a conservative humanist, another mask.

  He understood he was outliving his age and feeling his eternal desire to live more recklessly he unscrewed the whisky miniature lid. As he took a swig, he felt the kilt with his toes near the base of the bar fridge. Pulling it on, he looked over to the bed where, in the strange night-light thrown by the digital clock and green-lit smoke alarms, Lynette looked as if underwater. He noticed that her arm was over her eyes. He lifted it. She was crying. Silently, without movement.

  Lynette?

  It’s fine, she said. You go.

  He did not want to say it but he had to say it.

  What’s the matter?

  Nothing.

  He leant down and touched his lips to her moss-hued forehead. The taste of powder. The imprisoning scent of jasmine that always awakened in him a desire to flee.

  It’s hard, she said, when you want something and you can’t have it.

  He grabbed his car keys. There was a great pleasure to be had driving drunk on back roads, the lights, the game of making sure he wasn’t caught, that he might one more time escape. He quickly finished dressing, skulled the last of the last Glenfiddich miniature, spent five frustrating minutes chasing down his misplaced sporran, which he finally found beneath the book of Japanese death poems, and left, forgetting to take his book with him.

  6

  DORRIGO GOT A forty-eight-hour leave the following week. He hitched a ride on a military flight back to Melbourne, and in the quiet and empty two days and a night with Ella he tried to make as much noise and movement as possible. He was more desperate for her than ever, as a man about to be kicked to death is desperate to cling to the mud beneath him.

  Several times he went to tell Ella of the woman who had talked to him in the Adelaide bookshop. But what was there to tell? Nothing had happened. He and Ella danced. They drank. What had happened? Nothing had happened.

  He held Ella like a life buoy. He longed to have her in bed to find him and her anew, and was grateful that she would have none of what suddenly seemed to him inexplicably adulterous. Her black hair, her dark eyes, her full figure—she was beautiful, and yet he felt nothing.

  What had happened? He was thinking not of hair or eyes but a feeling as baffling as a million dancing and meaningless dust motes. A strange guilt reduced him to bleakness. Yet what had he done? He had done nothing. He had talked, at best, for a few minutes, then had turned and left the bookshop. He didn’t even know her name. What had he asked of her? What had she said to him? Nothing! Nothing! He didn’t even know her name.

  Ella’s world—which had until then looked so comforting in its security and certainty that he had wished to belong to it—Dorrigo suddenly found pallid and bloodless. Though he tried to find in it that indefinable sense of ease, that ineradicable odour of power and its privileges, which he had found so attractive before, it meant nothing to him now—worse, it seemed repulsive.

  Ella and others explained away Dorrigo’s new awkwardness with that great solvent of the time: the war. The war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused. For his part, Dorrigo thought that he couldn’t wait for the war to arrive, if this was the alternative.

  Finally he told Ella, as though it were simply an odd encounter, yet in his telling it somehow sounded to him like an infidelity. He felt an incommunicable shame. Why could he not want Ella? And in portraying this stranger as an overly intense, rather inappropriate woman, he felt that he had betrayed what had happened, as well as her and somehow himself. He finished the story with a shudder.

  Was she pretty? Ella asked.

  He told her she was unremarkable. Feeling he had to say something more, he said she had nice—and he searched for some feature he had no memory of, that could not be deemed inappropriate—teeth. She had nice teeth, he said. And that was about it, really, he said.

  Fangs, more like it, said Ella, her voice a little high. And a red camellia in her hair? I mean to say. She sounds a monster.

  And yet she hadn’t been. She had stood there and something had happened, something had passed between them, and how he wished it hadn’t. Because Ella now appeared to him as someone he had never known before. Her chatter that he had once found joyful now
struck him as naïve and false, the perfume she wore only for him now stank in his nostrils, and he longed to hurt her so she would leave.

  Should I be jealous? asked Ella.

  Of what? he said. I can’t tell you how bloody happy I was to get out of that bookshop.

  A moment later he was kissing Ella. Ella was kind, he told himself. And somewhere within him he pitied Ella, and buried even deeper was an understanding that they would both suffer because of her kindness and his pity. He hated her kindness and he feared his pity, and he wanted only to escape it all forever. And the more he hated and feared and wished to escape, the more he kept kissing, and as their embraces grew more passionate, and as one moment passed into another and that day into the next, as life filled with life, his bleak mood passed, and he almost stopped thinking of the girl with the red camellia altogether.

  He grew cheerful, and the furlough seemed at once to go too fast and at the same time be a never-ending swirl of parties, chance meetings and new acquaintances. Everyone seemed to want to meet Ella’s man, be they her friends or her parents’ friends. And in this way he met much of Melbourne society, and he came to see himself in their image—as a young man who would after the war rise to great things. And everything in this perfect life fitted so sweetly together—he and Ella, and Ella’s family, and their place in the world, which would shortly be his place also. And what had been so difficult with Ella now became unexpectedly easy: there were no longer any barriers between them, and it was as it had been before, perhaps even better, and he had completely forgotten both the bookshop and his own doubts.

  On returning to Adelaide, he lost himself in the general staff work that he copyrightly so loathed. Outside a Nissen hut in the administration block of the Warradale camp—where he and some of the other medical staff had offices—dust blew in whirls around the parade ground, while inside, in the appalling oven-like heat, he tried to concentrate on the preparations for embarkation—supplies and equipment that were either non-existent or no one had thought necessary, along with a bewildering amount of paperwork of which he rarely saw the purpose or the end. Of a night there was the prospect of slightly cooler weather and parties with cold beer and iced rum punches, and he threw himself into them as well, seeking an oblivion that he sometimes found.

  A postcard arrived from Keith Mulvaney, repeating his invitation to come and visit him at his pub, the King of Cornwall. A hand-tinted photo of the hotel featured on the front of the card, showing a grand, four-storey stone building—complete with a three-sided verandah on every level that looked straight out onto a long, empty beach—built, according to the card, in 1886. To judge from the boaters and moustaches worn by the men at the front of the hotel, the card itself was only a little more recent. Dorrigo misplaced it amidst the office files.

  There was about everything and everyone a growing sense of frustration as reports came in of the Blitz in London, along with the first reports of the Australians in action in Libya against the Italians, yet they remained in camp in Adelaide. Rumours of impending embarkation and possible destinations—Greece, Britain, North Africa, an invasion of Norway—came and went.

  Dorrigo immersed himself in life, the furious work and frenetic partying, and let everything else wash ever further away. Late one afternoon, at the bottom of a pile of stretcher requisition forms, he chanced upon Keith Mulvaney’s postcard of his beachside hotel. And the following weekend, when he had a twelve-hour leave pass and nothing better to do, Dorrigo Evans drove down the coast in a coal-fired Studebaker truck he had borrowed from his batman’s brother.

  Near dusk, he arrived at a small settlement that served as a holiday village for Adelaidians. With the breeze off the ocean, and the sound of waves, the heat became not just tolerable, but something sensual and welcome. If the beach seemed as sweeping as it had been in the postcard, the King of Cornwall was both grander and more rundown than its photograph suggested, and there was about it the alchemical charm of old things fallen on hard times.

  Inside was a long, dark bar in the South Australian style: high-ceilinged, and with a pleasant dimness after the brutal light of the South Australian summer. The hues of stained wood and dun colours seemed to soothe and rest the eyes after the blaze of the outdoor world. The overhead fans rhythmically brushed the low drum of drinkers’ conversation. Dorrigo went to the bar, where a barmaid was tidying some bottles on the rear shelf. Her back was turned, and he asked her if she could help him find Keith Mulvaney.

  I’m Keith’s nephew, he added.

  You must be Dorrigo, the barmaid said as she turned. Her blonde hair was pulled up in a chignon. I’m—

  A cone of dull electric light that shone down onto the bar made her blue eyes glisten. For a moment there was something in them, then they emptied.

  I am Keith’s wife, she said.

  7

  HIS EYES DARTED everywhere, along the top shelf of rums and whiskies, to the other drinkers, to the bar towel that read THE KING OF CORNWALL. Resting on it, a woman’s hand, holding a damp tea towel. Elegant fingers with nails painted burgundy. He was seized by a mad desire to feel them in his mouth. He felt himself shimmering, spinning before her.

  Tell Keith that—

  Yes.

  That my leave was shortened. And I can’t stay.

  And you’re—

  His nephew—

  Dorry?

  He couldn’t remember his name but it sounded right.

  You’re Dorry? Dorrigo? Isn’t that what they call you?

  Well, yes. Yes.

  It’s . . . unusual.

  My grandfather was born there. They say he rode with Ben Hall.

  Ben Hall?

  The bushranger:

  For just as in the days

  Of Turpin and Duval

  The people’s friends were outlaws

  And so too was bold Ben Hall.

  Do you ever use your own words? she asked.

  Dorrigo’s my middle name but it—

  Stuck?

  I guess so.

  Keith’s not here. He’ll be very disappointed he missed you.

  The war.

  Yes. That Mr Hitler.

  I’ll drop by another time.

  Do, Dorry. He’ll be so sorry you couldn’t stay.

  He went to leave. Deep inside him was a terrible tumult of both excitement and betrayal, as though he was hers and she had abandoned him, and coupled to this a sense that she was his and he had to take her back. At the door he turned around and took two steps towards the bar.

  Haven’t we—? he said.

  She pinched the top of her blouse between her thumb and forefinger—her two brightly coloured nails like a Christmas beetle splaying its wings—and tugged the blouse upwards.

  The bookshop?

  Yes, she said.

  He walked back to the bar.

  I thought, he said, that they were—

  Who?

  He felt it, something about him and her, but he did not know what it was. There was nothing he could do about it. He did not understand it but he felt it.

  Those men. That they were—

  That they were what?

  With you. That—

  Yes?

  That they were—your—your admirers.

  Don’t be silly. Just some friends of a friend from the officers’ club I hadn’t seen for a long time. And some of their friends. So you’re the clever young doctor?

  Well, young, yes. But so are you.

  Ageing. I’ll tell Keith you called.

  She began wiping the bar. A drinker tilted an empty froth-rimed glass in her direction.

  Coming, she said.

  He left, drove the truck back to the city, found a bar and determinedly drank himself into oblivion and couldn’t remember where he had parked the Studebaker. But when he awoke there was no annihilation of the memory of her. His pounding head, the pain in every movement and act and thought, seemed to have as its cause and remedy her, and only her and only her and only her.
/>   For several weeks after, he tried to lose himself by joining with an infantry company’s endless route marches as a medical officer, marching up to twenty miles a day—from valley vineyards, where they filled their canteens with muscat and red wine, to coastal beaches where they swam, and then marched back, and then back again—through heat so intense it felt like a foe. He would help carry the packs of men who collapsed with fatigue, he drove himself beyond any sense. Finally, the company commander ordered him to back off a little so that he not seem a fool to the men.

  Of a night he wrote letters to Ella, in which he tried to lose himself in the forms and tropes of love that he had learnt from literature. The letters were long, dull and false. His mind was tormented by thoughts and feelings that he had never read. Accordingly, he understood that they could not be love. He felt a swirling of hatred and lust for Keith’s wife. He wanted to seize her body. He wanted never to see her again. He felt a contempt and strange distance, he felt a complicity—as though he knew something he should not know—and he felt, strangely, that she knew it too. He reasoned that once his corps embarked for overseas, he would happily never think of her again. And yet he could not stop thinking of her.

  He ate little, lost weight and seemed so oddly preoccupied that the company commander, both impressed and slightly concerned by Dorrigo’s extraordinary zeal, gave him a special twenty-four-hour furlough. Ella had said that she would come to Adelaide if he received a short-leave pass and lacked the time to travel to Melbourne. And though he fully intended to spend the leave with her, having even picked out a restaurant he would take her to, he somehow never got around to mentioning in any of his many letters and cards to Ella that he was about to go on leave. When the date grew close he reasoned that it would be unfair to tell her, as it would be too late for her to make any arrangements and she would be left only with a crushing disappointment. Having decided on this course of silence, and after solemnly vowing he would never return to the King of Cornwall, he rang his Uncle Keith, who invited him down to stay the night, saying that ‘my Amy’, as he called his wife, would be as pleased to see him as Keith himself.